Archive for Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs is senior fellow at the Independent Institute, editor of The Independent Review, and author of Delusions of Power (Independent Institute).
Wartime Origins of Modern Income-Tax Withholding
Wars have always been the most important occasions for the introduction of new forms of taxation. At the outset of a war the state suddenly needs greatly increased revenues to pay for personnel and matériel to prosecute the war. Although governments typically increase the rates of existing explicit taxes and raise the rate of the [...]
1Nov2007 | Robert Higgs | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Great Duration, 1929–41
Economists, following the usage of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their classic Monetary History of the United States, call the economic collapse between 1929 and 1933 the Great Contraction. In my own writings, I have added two similar terms to refer to other aspects of the Great Depression—the Great Duration and the Great Escape. [...]
1Jul2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Contraction, 1929–33
The recession that began in mid-1929 need not have become a disaster. Many downturns had occurred previously in U.S. economic history, and nearly all of them had been fairly shallow and soon followed by recovery and continued growth. In the nineteenth century most people had believed that the government neither knew how nor possessed the [...]
1Apr2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedFrom the Armistice to the Great Depression
When the Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918, bringing World War I to a close, the belligerent nations of Europe were economically almost prostrate—their labor forces and capital stocks depleted greatly, their domestic economic structures distorted grotesquely, and their old arrangements for international trade and investment shattered. To make matters worse, the Versailles Treaty, [...]
1Dec2006 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedWhen the Government Took Over U.S. Investment
In the oft-quoted final chapter of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes concluded that if we are to avoid a chronic tendency toward economic depression, the state will have to undertake, among other things, “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment . . . though this need not exclude all manner [...]
1Sep2006 | Robert Higgs | 1 comment | ContinuedHow U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor
Ask a typical American how the United States got into World War II, and he will almost certainly tell you that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Americans fought back. Ask him why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he will probably need some time to gather his thoughts. He might say that the [...]
1May2006 | Robert Higgs | 12 comments | ContinuedQuasi-Corporatism: America’s Homegrown Fascism
Full-fledged corporatism, as a system for organizing the formulation and implementation of economic policies, requires the replacement of political representation according to area of residence by political representation according to position in the socioeconomic division of labor. The citizen of a corporate state has a political identity not as a resident of a particular geographical [...]
1Jan2006 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Economic Policy of Machiavelli’s Prince
Niccol Machiavelli, statesman and writer of
Renaissance Florence, got what countless
writers have sought and only a few have
achieved: his name became immortal. It is known not so
much as a proper noun but as an adjective, and that
adjective is not one in which he could take great pride.
The Republic of West Florida: Freedom Fight or Land Grab?
Probably not one American in a hundred knows anything about the short-lived Republic of West Florida (1810). At first glance it might seem to have sprung from a worthy fight for self-government and independence from Spain. On closer inspection, however, this venture, born of low-level filibuster and high-level intrigue, illustrates the same ingrained American propensity [...]
1Jun2005 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | ContinuedHow the Western Cattlemen Created Property Rights
During the last third of the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs created a vast open-range cattle industry in the Great Plains region of the United States. During the War Between the States, when Texas had been cut off from free-flowing commerce with the rest of the country, huge herds of cattle had built up on the state’s [...]
1Mar2005 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedFrom Wartime Expedient to Permanent Pork Barrel: WFC to RFC to SBA
When the U.S. government mobilized the economy to support its participation in World War I, it intervened in the market system in many ways. Yet private capital markets continued to operate. They did not always operate, however, as the government wished. Some enterprises that the government considered essential to its mobilization program—especially in lumbering, coal [...]
1Oct2004 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Greatest Privatization Ever
After the Revolutionary War, the 13 newly independent states of North America came into conflict over their territorial boundaries, especially in the area west of the Appalachian Mountains. Seven states claimed territories extending to the Mississippi River. Between 1781 and 1802, however, the states resolved these conflicts, mainly by ceding most of their “western” lands [...]
1Jun2004 | Robert Higgs | 1 comment | ContinuedTruman’s Attempt to Seize the Steel Industry
In U.S. history many of the most drastic incursions on private property rights have sprung from the conjunction of a threatened work stoppage, owing to a union-management dispute, and the government’s desire to expedite a war-production program. Such a conjunction underlay the government’s nationalization of the railroads, the telegraph lines, and the Smith & Wesson [...]
1Mar2004 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | ContinuedHow the Federal Government Got into the Ocean-Shipping Business
Someone who maintains that the relations between government and business in the United States during the past century have been essentially fascistic could find no better example than ocean shipping. Here we observe all the requisite elements of economic fascism: government-authorized and -supervised cartels, the semblance of private property rights without the substance, and the [...]
1Nov2003 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Grover Cleveland Vetoed the Texas Seed Bill
Grover Cleveland was the last U.S. president with a valid claim to be known as a classical liberal. (By the time “Silent Cal” Coolidge became president, the big-government horse was already out of the barn, and Ronald Reagan as president was as much the big-government problem as he was the solution.) A lawyer who lacked [...]
1Jul2003 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Politics Ruined the Northwest Salmon Fishery
When white men began to move into the Pacific Northwest in large numbers in the second half of the nineteenth century, they found numerous aboriginal tribes whose economies centered on a flourishing salmon fishery. The natives took advantage of the salmon’s anadromous life course. These fish are spawned in the gravel beds of mountain streams. [...]
19Apr2003 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedA Tale of Two Brain Trusts
“A political war,” said Raymond Moley, “is one in which everyone shoots from the lip.”1 He knew what he was talking about. Moley was the organizer and unofficial leader of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” the coterie of close advisers and speechwriters who helped FDR win the election of 1932 and assisted in formulating many [...]
1Oct2002 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | Continued-
The Latest
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Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
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Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
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